A: Crash and burn

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w070618&s=schaffer062107
Welcome to the age of the whiny conservative.
Sore Losers
by Michael Currie Schaffer

Not yet six months old, 2007 has already been a fantastic year for conservative belly-aching. Whether they're defending a dishonest attorney general or a hypocritical World Bank chief, begging for time in Iraq or pleading for leniency on behalf of Scooter Libby, griping about how irreverent Americans provoke terrorists or siccing the Justice Department's once-proud Civil Rights Division on those brutes who would dare discriminate against our population of religious zealots, the remaining true believers of the right have spent the year in one long, plaintive wail about the unfairness of it all. Though the specific complaints may vary, the refrain in this chorus of kvetching is the same: It's always someone else's fault. Boo hoo.

Given last year's election results, the griping should come as little surprise: It's the province of folks with few other options, especially when politics remains dominated by the still-unfolding disasters they created. Still, it's worth wondering whether the explosion of self-pity doesn't herald some larger change in the popular political imagination, where liberals were always the ones cueing up the tiny violins. Have conservatives finally closed the whining gap?

Having lost before a jury of his peers, Libby summoned a cross-section of Washington's elite to attest to his decency. To be sure, such letter-writing campaigns are common for federal convicts, the lowest of whom can always manage to find a few neighbors and friends who can describe them as charitable family men. More telling, in Libby's case, was the shrill breast-beating of his neocon chums from the Bush administration

"His career and reputation are in ruins," Wolfowitz wrote, apparently unaware that such consequences tend to be the case when you, um, get busted for breaking federal law.

Wolfowitz, of course, should know a thing or two about mooning over ruined reputations and damaged careers. His own fall from grace just a couple months earlier featured the same set-pieces of whiny conservative consequence-dodging: The implication that nitpicky rules shouldn't apply to someone engaged in the noble pursuit of global strategery;

But if personal, public breast-beating is especially colorful, it's institutional griping that best reflects the whiny image of the contemporary right--and the danger for conservatives of becoming known as this can-do nation's top kvetchers.


As foes of Bush's bill rose into a chorus of high dudgeon over the White House's switchblade style, at least a few chatterers on the left sat back to enjoy the irony: "I have to say, it gives me a great perverse delight to hear conservatives talking about, 'We're victims. We're victims. We've been treated badly by our leaders,'" said Mark Shields on PBS's "NewsHour." "I mean, I'm sorry, Peggy. I'm sorry Laura, you poor, conservative folks who've been so mistreated by George W. Bush. Those Western men, they're just mean."